Problems and Questions on Agency and Free Will

In reading this article, it may help to have a cursory understanding of the free will debate in philosophy. It certainly wouldn’t be necessary, but it would likely contribute to the relevance and your understanding of this article.

We are taught (and more importantly, it is in the scriptures) that we have agency, here used synonymously with free will, which here refers to our ability to make decisions without them being predetermined by other factors. These factors are often identified as any combination of physics, evolutionary psychology, seemingly random circumstances, and others. This topic and debate is widely applicable and important, but most notably for us when choosing good or evil, with help from our conscience, the Light of Christ.

However determinism (the philosophy that advocates against the existence of free will) argues that all actions must have causes, and that all actions are simply reactions and not truly free. This is seemingly a very valid point which is troublesome within Mormon theology once one digs deep enough, at least in my studies. For the sake of simplicity let’s ignore the arguments centered around this mortal life and assume God has granted us free will in this life although we may currently be unable to know how exactly this is compatible with causality and modern science.

Before we totally move past this mortal frame of reference, a subject of concern is that of mentally sick people. I don’t mean diseased or simply neurodivergent people. Rather, I mean sick, twisted, emotionless people capable of committing truly atrocious actions. People who simply cannot feel empathy (sociopaths and/or psychopaths, I’m not too updated on the psychological literature on the scientific terminology, and a simple Google search isn’t helping either) are either somehow responsible for not harboring a conscience (“the Light of Christ”) or are not responsible for their horrible actions (be those murder, rape, or other less severe unethical and criminal activities, such as con artistry), similar to children’s innocence. These tendencies appear to stem from combinations of genetics and early childhood experiences. Is there an on/off switch for moral agency in regards to accountability, or something of a continuum? Anyway, on to my main concern.

To reiterate, let’s assume that because of the victory in the War in Heaven the majority of us have free agency and are therefore responsible for our actions. In that premortal existence we were tasked with choosing to support God and Christ, with the plan that mortals would have this agency and responsibility, or support Lucifer, with the plan that we should not have freedom of the will and be metaphysically compelled to “choose” the right, ensuring not only salvation, but exaltation for all of humankind at the expense of meaningful progress, self-ownership, and self-determination.

When we chose God or Satan then, how were those choices ours? Weren’t they all decided by our personality–which is an intrinsic part of our spiritual identity? So even if we have free will here, how did we have it there? Or did we all have an equal blank slate of a personality while remaining unique and individual children of Heavenly Parents? Even if that wild improbability of a level playing field were true, how then would the Sons of Perdition have sided with Satan and all of our choices been ours? I am completely confused how this was possible. Do we simply not know enough about existence with God before we were born? Are any of these even relevant?

One possibility is that I am projecting many temporal and mortal realities that may not have been in play into this unknowable situation that is far beyond our current understanding. Most directly, could we as spirit children have been exempt from the natural laws of causality? Our theology is often looked at, correctly in my opinion, as being theologically naturalistic, meaning God is subject to science and mathematical laws governing the universes and is not wholly supernatural, only far beyond and outside of our mortal scope of understanding, how then can we have free will in this sort of universe?

I hope this makes at least a little sense. I might be missing something and/or coming at this with the wrong angle. I’m not certain we can have all the answers in this life, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t try. It seems like a decent, if not minuscule, step to Godhood to try to figure these things out.

Seth Dunn is a seemingly average Mormon guy with lesser known passions in heterodox economics, philosophy, radical politics, procrastination, music, D&D and many things Mormon. Eclectic and nuanced; something for everyone and some things they very well may not like. His only universally applicable advice is "Be excellent to each other," as well as "Party on, dude!"

3 Comments

Craig Morris
on March 12, 2016 at 9:20 pm

Your spirit houses an intelligence that God didn’t create. Spirit is matter, but more refined, so maybe intelligence is matter even more refined. Maybe ultimately everything is causal but causation of the intelligence is more refined and we call it freewill. The important thing is, God didn’t create your intelligence and can’t be held responsible for its choices. We may say, but I didn’t choose my intelligence, it just was, how can I be responsible for it? And the hard answer is, that’s just the way it is. You have a part of you that is uncreated, it is what it is, deal with it the best you can. Is it fair. Nope, but there it is.

The conundrum of free will in a “theologically naturalistic” setting, wherein God is held to be “subject to science and mathematical laws governing the universe,” is resolved if we dismiss the naturalistic theology part. It has no doctrinal support. We don’t live in “that sort” of universe. God is not subject to the universe, rather the reverse. A good, succinct statement of this position, in which I am in accord, has been provided by Joseph F. McConkie:

“God is the author of law, not its creation or its servant. All light and law emanate from him (DC 88:13, 41-42). . . True it is that God was once a man obtaining his exalted status by obedience to the laws of his own eternal Father, but upon obtaining his exalted status he became the source of light and law to all that he creates.” (Answers, p. 166-168.)

In this view, gravity, electromagnetic and the weak and strong nuclear forces (and anything else) do what they do because God so decrees them to do so.

Those enamored of science seem to want a backup to faith, a sort of insurance policy. If something can be confirmed by science, we can then safely exercise faith in it. They seek to expand the circle of science until God can finally be brought within. This is both wrong-headed and unnecessary.

Science is wonderful and accurate at describing the mortal universe of time and decaying matter that we currently inhabit. It’s of no use in describing the deathless state before the Fall or the Eternities where God lives – the universe(s) of eternally permanent matter that are kept from our direct knowledge by the veil. From the eternities, all things in space and time – past, present and future – are “present” before God’s eyes; he doesn’t need a telescope to see faraway objects or a vehicle to travel to them; his outstretched hand can “hold” them and his eye can “pierce” them; they are “round about” him. As with a flat sheet of paper, upon which every point is in view to us, so too do those in the eternities have access to any point in our three-dimensional mortal world regardless of mortal barriers; Moroni did not need a door or window or a hole in the roof to reach Joseph Smith. (There is an insightful article from 1980 in BYU Studies (20:3) entitled “Some Thoughts on Higher-dimensional Realms.”)

My own view is that the attempt by some LDS writers to reconcile science and religion by trying to fit all of God’s creations into the visible universe is misguided. Of all the planets, stars and galaxies we can see or could see with the most powerful telescope, none are eternal abodes of resurrected beings. The entire universe we see and study, vast as it is, is of the same kind of decaying matter as we are and is separate from the eternal realms. Kolob, which governs only one class of stars, is not in our visible universe (let alone galaxy) nor is God’s throne (which, as an aside, is said to be “nigh unto” – near – Kolob, not on it. God doesn’t live on Kolob. Paris isn’t “nigh unto” France.)

The Eternities are not bound by space and time the way we are; they are “near” everything but kept from us in another dimension. At the Second Coming, the “curtain of heaven” will be “unfolded, as a scroll is unfolded after it is rolled up” (DC 88:95). When Christ arrives, “all flesh shall see [him] together” (DC 101:24), a neat trick on a three-dimensional globe. Jesus is not coming from the center of the galaxy or from anywhere else we can see; He is off stage, as it were, from where He has always been watching over us and is near to us.

Modern cosmology (a fascinating topic) proposes not that the Big Bang spewed matter into the only universe there is (typically conceived of as the endless, empty space containing everything that can be), but that the Big Bang created the whole of this universe – both the space and the time we now live in. It’s difficult to grasp (though the author Brian Greene does a good job), but from it we can get a glimpse of the extensive majesty and power of God and of Godliness.

Thus, God is the source of law for the entire universe we inhabit. This realization also provides one, logically consistent picture of reality – God created this and is in charge of the whole of it. There need be no give-and-take between God and a separate, superseding “naturalistic Universe” to which God is beholden and is in some kind of dynamic tension with. Obviously, the mysteries of godliness are deep and beyond our current comprehension – but they are all under God’s control, not of something else.

And such a God is powerful enough to make us free: “I, the Lord God, make you free, therefore ye are free indeed; and the law also maketh you free.” (DC 98:8) There are no “natural” constraints to agency, no kind of predestination. But with that freedom comes a chilling responsibility. Wickedness and rebellion (the same thing, really) will send Lucifer and his followers into Outer Darkness. It sounds unpleasant. Of the wicked in this world who inherit the Telestial kingdom the scripture asserts that, “where God and Christ dwell they cannot come, worlds without end.” (DC 76:112). Hence the continual, pleading cry of prophets from Day One to repent and follow Christ (“Behold, I am the law, and the light” 3 Nep 15:9). And everyone has been given the freedom to do just that, whether in life or death.

The more I think about it and the older I get it seems to be less clear to me.

Two items I have heard lately leave me scratching my head on “free will”.

One is woman in her 60’s that mentioned back a few years before she was on hormone therapy for a while and the endocrinologist was still “working things out”. One week she felt really odd. She could not stop thinking of sex day and night and most every minute. She mentioned that to her doc at the next visit. He looked over the chart and said, “I think we way overdid the testosterone. You got to experience what every teenage boy’s brain feels like.” She said it profoundly changed how she looked at young men. She actually admired them for their restraint and she felt sorry for them.

The other item is something I think I heard on the Startalk podcast. It was a reference to someone that was going through hormonal treatment for a sex change operation (don’t remember what ‘direction’ the operation was). The person getting the treatment said they felt their brain working differently, so much that they no longer believed in free will.

And these are chemicals that are in sometimes fractions of a part per million in our blood.

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